Buch lesen: «The Colour of Heaven»

VENICE

No one noticed the child.

He had been left in a small boat which now sailed out towards the lagoon, following nothing but the slap and tide of each narrow canal.

It was Ascension Day in the year twelve hundred and ninety-five, and the people of Venice were parading through the streets, hoisting crimson pennants and bright-yellow banners in celebration. Tailors dressed in white tunics with crimson stars, weavers in silver cloth tippets, and cotton spinners in cloaks of fustian mingled with blacksmiths, carpenters, butchers, and bakers, singing and shouting their way towards the Piazza San Marco.

The square was filled with showmen, swindlers, soothsayers, and charlatans; jesters, jugglers, prophets, and priests. Alchemists cried out that scrapings of amber gave protection from the plague, and that an emerald pressed against naked flesh could preserve a woman from apoplexy. A dentist with silver teeth sold a special compound which he vowed would improve the value of all metal; a barber displayed a gum to make bald men hirsute; and a naked Englishman sold pine seeds which were said to guarantee invisibility as surely as the talisman of Gyges.

But no one had noticed the baby.

Teresa could have ignored him, another abandoned child due for an early death at the Foundlings’ Hospital; but once she had seen him the shock of love took hold.

She watched the boat spin gently against the side of a little rio, caught in a momentary eddy, as if waiting only for her arrival. Perhaps this was a gift from God at last, alleviation for all that she had suffered.

She looked around, for mother or father, doctor or stranger, but amidst the movement of the crowd they were the only people to be still, the abandoned baby and the woman who could never have children: Teresa, wife of Marco the glass-maker, barren. No other adjective was necessary. Her pale-blue eyes, thin frame, and slender beauty meant nothing. When people wanted to describe her, they spoke but the one word: barren.

She knelt down beside the waters and gathered in the child.

‘Calme, calme, mio bambino.’

The baby’s mouth began to pucker, longing for milk.

Teresa knew that she should go into the church and ask the priest what to do but at that moment the doors swung open and a vast procession emerged, singing Psalms and praising God. She let the pageant go by, watching a group of children carrying silver bowls filled with rose petals, whispering and squabbling as they passed.

Teresa tried to convince herself that she did not need the child. She should leave him, as his mother had left him, and as hundreds of other mothers would do on this very day throughout the city. Children were a drain, and a curse, the punishment for sexual excess. They cried. They were always hungry. They grew up to take your money and denounce you. That was what Marco had always told her: her husband, who could, in fact, be as barren as she. They had never known.

She could hear his voice telling her to put the baby back, leaving it either for charity, another mother, or death. What was one child more or one child less in the world when we are born only to live, suffer, and die?

She sat down on the steps of the church.

The child was so pale and so fair.

Out in the lagoon, trumpeters, troubadours, and drummers sailed past the Doges’ Palace singing of beauty and lost love, saluting both the rising and the setting of the sun, mothers and daughters, mistresses and maids, the besotted and the beloved.

Some of the boats were preparing tableaux of the Christian mysteries: the shipwrights and carpenters were to re-enact Noah’s flood; the vintners would create the illusion of Christ turning the water into wine, whereas Marco’s single-sailed sandolo had been transformed into a moveable theatre in which his fellow glass-makers would perform ‘The harrowing of hell’.

His friends were dressed as heavy-drinking devils with horns made from old fish baskets, and their blowpipes had become instruments of diabolic torture. Marco was to play the devil himself. He stood on the prow, his smoky frame dominating the boat, and bellowed a list of the torments awaiting all sinners. Rival guilds watched in wonder as Marco blew flames, drank, shouted, and sang of terror and disaster. The nearer other boats sailed, the more dramatic his gestures became until he could resist temptation no longer and began to describe the precise location of the mouth of hell.

He turned round, bent over, and mooned at all who might look at him, shouting:

‘Guarda! Guarda!

La bocca d’inferno è nel mio culo!’

Encouraged by his companions, he then provided a triumphant auditory accompaniment to the gesture.

‘Ecco un fracasso del diavolo!’

The longer the day lasted, and the more red wine they drank, the funnier such antics seemed, until the time came for the youngest glass-maker to harrow hell. Young Pietro emerged from beneath the sail (which now became the flag of Resurrection) carrying a vast glass crucifix and shouted:

‘We have blown this crucifix as surely as Christ will blast away the gates of Death.’

He then struck his fellow workers with the cross, and they dived into the waters of the lagoon, an improbable reminder of the power of baptism and redemption.

‘This sky is our heaven, these waters our home. Let no one deny the promises we have been vouchsafed!’ Pietro shouted.

The Doge’s gilded barge, the Bucintoro, sailed past the spluttering glass-makers in preparation for the ceremonial marriage of Venice to the sea. The boat moved out towards the Lido, canopied in red, shining with golden river gods, zephyrs, putti, and mermaids, the Lion of St Mark fluttering above.

The Doge rose to the prow of his ship and took the ceremonial glass ring from his finger.

Then he proclaimed, ‘O Sea, we wed thee in sign of our everlasting dominion,’ and threw the ring out into the Adriatic.

The Bucintoro turned back, its oars gleaming in the light. Marco and his men, now safely back on board their boat, raised a fiasco of wine, as if toasting their leader, and prepared to sail back to Murano, content with their day’s display.

As they did so, Teresa opened her blouse and pinched at her breast. The child squirmed in her arms. She would have to take the baby to her sister, for, whereas Teresa could not even begin to conceive, Francesca could not stop having children. The milk poured out of her so much that she worked as a wet nurse to sustain her family.

Teresa began to walk up towards the Misericordia. She watched the crowd stream over the bridges, returning home to eat and drink before the curfew, ready to share their thoughts about the day, to joke perhaps, to laugh, even to make love.

Boats headed out into the lagoon.

At first her sister thought she was carrying the baby on a mission from another mother. ‘Where is it from?’

‘I do not know.’

‘What have you done?’

‘I have a child at last.’

‘How?’

Teresa tried to remain defiant. ‘I found it. By the Church of the Apostles.’

Francesca could not believe such folly. ‘If I had known you were desperate you could have raised one of mine.’

‘I didn’t want one of yours. I wanted one of my own.’

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t check? Here. Let me look.’

Teresa handed her sister the child.

‘It’s a boy. He needs feeding.’ Francesca opened her blouse and took the baby to her breast. He drank noisily, hungrily. Teresa watched the child suck and felt the first stirrings of jealousy.

‘I always knew you would do something stupid.’

‘It’s not stupid. Look at him.’

‘You’ll have to pay me,’ Francesca demanded.

The two sisters looked at the child, feeding greedily, possessed by need. Teresa was surprised for the first time by the noise: the spluttering and the gasping, the desire and the power of a baby at the breast sucking for life itself. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.

‘Of course it does. But you get used to it. He’s feeding well. Then he’ll be sick.’

‘Sick?’

‘You’ve been spared all this: the milk and pain of motherhood, the jealous husband, the cries in the night. Disease. Illness. Death. What do you want a child for?’

‘Joy,’ said Teresa. ‘I want him for joy.’

Marco had drunk several flasks of wine by the time he rowed alongside the Fondamenta Santa Caterina to collect his wife. At times he could not believe that he was married to this woman. He wondered whether he should have wed her sister, a woman with plenty of flesh on her, proper breasts, firm hips, and a body in which a man could lose himself. But did he want all those babies and all that milk? He held his flask of wine aloft in greeting.

Teresa shivered nervously, and gave him a small wave. That is my husband, she thought, as if the events of the day had made them strangers both to the city and to each other. They had never looked as if they belonged together: Teresa thin, anxious, and bird-like; her husband broad, swarthy, and muscular, like Vulcan or some dark river god.

‘Did you watch?’ he asked.

Teresa had forgotten that she might have to lie. ‘There were so many people. And you were far away.’

‘I told you that you should have come with us.’

‘There was not room. It was for men. You know that.’

‘It would not have mattered.’

‘Did you see the Doge?’ asked Teresa.

‘I did. And he saw us. It was a triumph.’

As her husband recounted the story of the day, Teresa realised that she could not take in what he was saying. She could think only of the child. Perhaps she should tell him now, she thought, in this stillness, out in the lagoon. She should confess, or even shout out, that the baby was the only thing that mattered to her, more important than either his love or her own death.

She wondered what it would be like to tell him. She almost wanted to laugh with the joy of it all, sharing this new happiness with the man she loved. But she knew that Marco would be fearful, his mood would change, and that it would ruin the day. He would talk about money. He would ask her to take the child back. And he would not give the real reason for his fear: the fact that a son might change their marriage, that they would no longer be alone.

He put out a line and began to fish.

As the boat rocked on the water, Teresa remembered holding the child in her arms. Although she ached for him, she knew that she must hide the fact, as if the revelation of such a secret would only destroy its beauty.

At last there was movement on the line and Marco flicked up a sturgeon, its back gleaming against the dying light, twitching in midair before being cast down onto the floor of the boat.

‘E basta,’ Marco cried, still happy.

A wind started up, blowing across the lagoon. Teresa watched her husband pull in the line and begin to row harder for the island.

‘Did you gather the wood this morning?’ he asked.

Teresa knew the question mattered, but could not remember why. ‘Alder,’ she replied.

‘Enough for tonight and tomorrow?’

‘Plenty,’ Teresa answered.

‘Then I am happy.’

They tied up the sandolo, and Marco took his wife’s hand. Together they walked along the Fondamenta dei Vetrai, past the furnaces of each family of glass-makers, lined in rivalry and solidarity, until they reached their home, glowing against the impending night, the secret unspoken between them.

Teresa visited her sister every week. Francesca taught her to hold the baby, calm him when he cried, rock and console him. But Teresa didn’t need encouragement. As she held the boy she realised that not only was the child beginning to belong to her, but that she belonged to the child. She had given herself away.

‘You look as if you’ve never seen a baby before,’ her sister remarked.

‘I haven’t. Not like this.’

Teresa inspected every finger and toe. She felt the weight of her new son’s head, cupping it in her palm. His eyes stared away into the distance as if he had come from some other world and knew its secrets. How could she live with such a love? How could she ever do enough for him? What if he was too hot, too cold, too hungry, or too thirsty? How could she guard against fever? What if he fell sick? What if he died?

Soon Teresa could not bear to be apart from the boy. Only she loved him sufficiently to protect him from the perils of the earth. Only she knew what it was to truly love and care for him. The anxiety grew so strong that she began to panic every time she had to leave.

‘You love him too much,’ Francesca warned, but Teresa insisted, ‘One can never love too much.’

Her sister could not agree. ‘You can. Believe me.’

Teresa could sense her disapproval.

‘You had freedom. Why lose it?’ Francesca continued.

‘Because I need to love.’

‘And the child?’

‘The child would have died.’

‘The hospital would have taken him.’

‘You know that’s a lie. And if they had … You know what happens. They never live.’

Francesca dismissed her sister. ‘It’s only a child.’

‘What?’

‘Some live, some die.’

‘How can you be so heartless?’

‘Because I know what it is to love too much.’

‘Then you live in sadness.’

‘At least I do not live in dread,’ Francesca said quietly. ‘When will you tell Marco?’

‘When I bring the boy home.’

‘You will not warn him?’

‘No. I want there to be no argument.’

Marco lived a life of certainties: work, faith, and marriage. Most of the complexities of existence could be explained either by reason or by fate, and so, when he saw Teresa carrying the child, he was convinced that she was holding a new niece or nephew.

‘Francesca?’ he asked. ‘She can’t stop.’

‘The child has come from Francesca but she is not the mother.’

‘Who is?’ He smiled. ‘Have you stolen him?’

‘Nobody knows.’

‘Then what are you doing?’

‘I want to keep him,’ Teresa said suddenly.

‘He’s not ours to keep.’ Surely she was joking.

‘I found him,’ she continued quietly. ‘Six months ago. On Ascension Day.’

‘And what have you done?’

‘Francesca has weaned him for me.’

‘Then Francesca can keep him.’

‘No.’

It was the first time she had ever denied him.

Marco stepped back. ‘You’ve always intended to keep him – without talking to me, without asking my permission?’

‘I meant to tell you, but I knew that you would be angry.’

Why could he not understand? Did he not remember how she had been mad with the lack of a child? ‘I have to keep him. He is a son. For both of us.’

‘Not mine.’

‘Please,’ she appealed, and then immediately regretted the fact that she sounded so keen to appease.

‘Give him to the priest. Or to another mother. Take him back to your sister.’ This was what he had dreaded all these years: another man’s child.

‘I can’t,’ Teresa answered simply.

‘If you won’t give him away then I will,’ Marco replied, as if ending the argument.

‘No,’ she said.

‘He can’t stay,’ Marco reiterated.

‘Look at him.’

‘I can’t,’ said Marco firmly. ‘I won’t.’

‘Please,’ Teresa begged. ‘Look.’

Marco raised his eyes and studied the child. How could he be a father to someone so unlike himself? He tried to reason. ‘Can’t you see the disgrace?’

Teresa looked down at the child, and then directly into her husband’s eyes. ‘People will forgive us.’

‘They won’t,’ Marco asserted. ‘They’ll think you a whore.’

‘They know that I was never pregnant. They have seen me. Why else am I called barren?’

‘Then they’ll think it mine, that I have been with another.’

‘I don’t care.’ Teresa was suddenly fierce again, determined. ‘If you loved me then you would love the child.’

‘You know that I love you. But how can I love a child that is not mine? Do not ask me to do this. Have I not done enough for you? Cared for you? Loved you?’

‘But can’t you see?’

‘Please …’ Marco reasoned.

‘No. I ask you. I beg you,’ his wife replied. ‘I will do everything. You don’t have to talk to him. You don’t even have to look at him if you don’t want to. Just let me be with him.’

‘Rather than with me.’

‘It is not a choice between you and the child.’

‘It seems that it is.’

‘No,’ said Teresa once more. She realised, for the first time, that she liked the sound of the word: its percussive defiance. ‘He can work for you. We will need an apprentice.’

‘Don’t think of such things.’

The child began to wake and cry.

‘You see?’ said Marco.

‘I will care for him. You need do nothing. I will keep him away from you. Nothing about him need concern you.’

Teresa took the boy to the back of the house and fed him the bread softened in milk that she had prepared. She would hide him in the house for the night, stay with him, and protect him against her husband.

She laid the baby on a small upturned wooden bench that she had lined and covered in blankets. He would be safe with her. She would remain with him all night. Perhaps she would never sleep soundly again. Her life was guarding this child: against her husband and against the world.

‘Paolo,’ she said quietly. ‘I will call you Paolo.’

When Teresa woke she knew that something was wrong.

Her son had disappeared.

This was the punishment for all the elation he had given her. She could hear the men downstairs, laughing as they began their day’s work. She must ask them, force them even, to tell her what had happened.

‘Where’s Marco?’ she asked the stizzador, as he stoked the furnace.

The man shrugged.

‘Have you seen the child?’ she asked the apprentice.

‘The bastard?’

‘Not the bastard. The child.’

She felt the fury rise inside her. This was how they spoke. Already the apprentice had learned.

‘The foundling.’ It was as if he was correcting her.

‘My child,’ she shouted.

For a moment there was silence. The two men turned away.

Teresa walked outside and looked down the street. It started to rain, sudden and hard, momentarily confusing her. She tried to think how far Marco’s anger could stretch and the panic made her wild. She ran through the streets, asking all who would listen. She asked the boat builders, vintners, bakers, and butchers; the masons, shoemakers, coopers, and carpenters; the smiths, the fishermen, the barber, and the surgeon if they had seen either her husband or her child. She asked children and grandmothers, the lame and the sick, but it was as if the whole island was locked in a conspiracy to prevent her discovering the truth. Eliana the soothsayer who had never found a husband, Felicia the lace-maker from Burano who had married badly, Franco the blacksmith, Sandro the cooper, Domenico the farrier, Francesco the merchant, Gianni the vintner, Filippo the usurer, even Simona, whom half the island pitied and the other half envied because she too was barren, could not help Teresa in her search.

The rain caught in her hair and splashed up her bare legs. There was nowhere else to go, no one she could ask. Then she thought to check their boat. How could she have been so slow? Was this not the first thing she should have done?

Her sandals were waterlogged and she stopped to take them off, running barefoot through the slippery streets. Perhaps Paolo would be resting in the boat, waiting for her as he had when she had first found him.

She was struck by the shock of memory.

Her pace began to slow, as if she dared not face the inevitability of absence. How could Marco have done this?

She stopped, breathed in, and let the rain fall.

She closed her eyes, praying the boat would be there, and that her husband would be with the child.

But the sandolo was gone.

Perhaps she had not prayed hard enough.

Teresa knew that she should go to the church of San Donato and pray without ceasing. She would let God know how much she loved her son.

It was raining so hard that she could hardly see. Her body twitched as she ran, as if shaking off the rain and ridding herself of anxiety were one and the same.

She entered the church, took from the stoop of holy water, genuflected, and ran to the front of the nave.

She slid down onto her knees, and lay prostrate before the altar.

‘Mary, Mother of God, Mother of all Mothers, aid me in my distress.

‘Mary, Mother of God, Mother of all Mothers, who knows what it is to love a son, aid me in my distress.

‘Mary, Mother of God, Mother of all Mothers, who knows what it is to lose a son, aid me in my distress.’

She stretched out her arms in submission.

Teresa would not move until Paolo was returned to her. She would lie through every service, each day and every night until Marco, God, and the island had mercy upon her.

For the first hour, no one took any notice. Acts of devotion were common, and the priest almost applauded her piety. But as the day wore on, and services continued, people began to whisper that it was strange she had not moved. One woman noticed that a glass bead from Teresa’s rosary had shattered on the floor. Another wondered if she might be dead.

By the afternoon, an elderly lady remarked that she had never seen such piety; another observed that the prostrate woman must have many sins to forgive. At last someone suggested that they should go and tell her husband.

The priest was summoned, and he agreed to fetch Marco himself. It was a husband’s job to look after a lunatic wife, not a priest’s.

By the time he returned, a crowd of people had congregated under the mosaic of San Donato.

Teresa’s head rested in a circle of porphyry that made it look, to the disapproving, as if it had already spilled its blood. To the faithful it could have been a halo.

Then Marco arrived, pushing through the crowd.

He stopped, halfway up the nave.

‘Rise, woman.’

Teresa did not move.

‘I said, rise.’

Marco looked to the priest, who gestured that he move forward, encouraging him to join her on the floor. Marco was suspicious.

The priest gestured again.

Reluctantly Marco walked forward, stopped, and then crouched down beside his wife, his knees cracking in the echoing church.

Teresa shut her eyes more tightly.

Marco lay down beside her. The cool of the floor began to chill his bones.

‘The child is safe,’ he said at last.

Still Teresa said nothing.

‘Safe,’ Marco repeated.

What was he supposed to do?

‘He is with the friars, on the Island of the Two Vines. They will look after him.’

Teresa sensed the people were there, watching, but she knew that she had to stay here, completely prostrate, until her husband consented to her every demand. If she capitulated now she would never see Paolo again.

‘Only I can look after him …’

Marco lay on the floor without knowing what he should do. He listened to his wife breathing as he did when he could not sleep; and, in the cold drama of that moment, he realised that perhaps he had never loved Teresa so much as he did now. She was prepared to humiliate herself or even die to fight for that child. He started to sit up and tried to take her hand, but it lay outstretched, palm down against the marble. ‘I am sorry.’

‘Give me my son.’

Marco tried to pull Teresa up from the floor, but still she would not move. About to let go, convinced that his wife would do nothing until he brought the child into the church and placed him back in her arms, he replied with two words: ‘Our son.’

Teresa’s grip tightened. Her left arm bent at the elbow, as if she was beginning to raise her body. She moved slowly, testing her ability to do so, checking that this was no dream. She rose from the ground and put her arms around her husband.

‘Let me go there. Let me bring Paolo home.’

‘Forgive me,’ cried Marco.

Teresa held him to her. ‘I will never ask anything of you again.’

The people under the mosaic began to move away. Marco and Teresa were embracing, clothing each other against all the doubts and fears of their future.

The next day Teresa rowed across the lagoon to collect her son. She could see the Island of the Two Vines from Murano, the bell tower jutting out amidst the cypress trees, and kept it in her sights throughout the journey, fearing it might disappear if ever she looked away.

She tied up the boat and walked across the marshes. Gradually the ground became firmer. A group of finches started up from the grass as she walked, and the air was loud with the sound of swifts, swallows, and cicadas. Ahead lay a grove of olives.

Teresa stopped.

Underneath the trees lay six open coffins, each one containing a friar.

Perhaps the island was diseased, and the midges and flies of the wasteland had carried an infection in the air. Had Marco lied and sent her here to die? Was the island deserted? And where was Paolo?

Suddenly, one of the dead friars sat up in his coffin and sang.

‘Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven.’

Teresa screamed.

A second dead monk sat up.

‘Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and clouds, calms and all weather by which thou upholdest life in all creatures.’

Teresa found herself in the middle of a mighty Resurrection, as if Judgment Day had arrived without warning. Each of the monks sat up in turn, arms outstretched, gazing high into the heavens.

‘Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable unto us and humble, and precious, and clean.’

‘Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright and pleasant and strong.’

‘Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits and flowers of many colours, and grass.’

‘Praise ye and bless the Lord, and give thanks unto him, and serve him with great humility.’

The first monk stepped out of his tomb and walked towards her, looking down at the ground as he did so.

‘Pax et bonum, peace and all good things, sister …’

‘My child …’ Teresa stuttered.

‘Our daily orisons …’ the nearest monk explained, also abandoning his tomb.

‘I am Brother Matteo and that is Brother Filippo.’ He gestured to the first monk.

The remainder now rose from their coffins but none would look her in the eye. Teresa thought they might be blind.

‘Also Brother Giuseppe, Brother Giovanni, Brother Jacopo, and Brother Gentile.’

‘I am Teresa, wife of Marco Fiolaro.’

‘Then you are blessed,’ said Matteo, looking at a patch of ground beneath her feet.

Further silence followed, and the monks stood smiling at the ground as if nothing else need happen.